Snapchat wants to beef up the technology behind its popular mobile app for disappearing messages.

Peter Magnusson, a former engineering director at Google, has joined the Los Angeles startup as a vice president of engineering, co-founder Bobby Murphy said in an interview. The hiring is part of a talent grab that could add as many as 50 engineers this year to Snapchat’s current team of just 15 developers, he said.

The expansion comes on the heels of a wild year for Snapchat, when the app became one of the most popular smartphone downloads and the company spurned a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook. Snapchat said in November it was processing more than 400 million messages a day, up from 200 million in June.

By investing in technology, the young startup could add security and features to its software offering and head off potential competitive threats.

Magnusson is the latest tech veteran Snapchat has poached from much larger technology giants. Timothy Sehn, a former engineering director at Amazon, joined in September and Facebook executive Emily White left the social networking company to become Snapchat’s chief operating officer in December.

Magnusson noticed the company’s rapid growth while he was in charge of Google’s App Engine, the suite of tools that helps developers build and run software. “Snapchat runs primarily on Google data centers,” Magnusson said. The startup “was one of our largest customers.”

Snapchat will over time build more of its own technology infrastructure, Murphy said. “We’ll continue to build out infrastructure to support our unique needs, and we’ll do that in part by leveraging as much of what Google and other service providers offer,” he said.

What differentiates Snapchat from most other tech companies is that the service constantly erases messages from its servers, freeing it from having to store massive amounts of data.

“The whole IT industry — going back to the ‘80s or ‘90s – everything is stored and saved and archived,” Magnusson said. “Snapchat is revisiting it and saying, hey, for person to person communication, we don’t want any of that.”

Security is also a focus for Snapchat following a data breach that exposed millions of user names and phone numbers in recent weeks. The company apologized and updated its app to let users opt out of connecting their phone numbers to their user names on the service.

Building a security team “will be a major priority for the company,” said Murphy, who is also Snapchat’s chief technology officer.

One challenge for Snapchat in its recruitment efforts is relocating engineers from the San Francisco Bay Area to the company’s headquarters in Southern California. Magnusson, like many other Snapchat employees, recently relocated south.

“Snapchat is creating the reason to move to ‘Silicon Beach,’” Murphy said.

Corrections & Amplifications: A previous version of this article incorrectly reported that Snapchat has five developers on its team. The company says it has 15 developers. The story also has been updated to add a statement from Bobby Murphy and to clarify that Snapchat, and not Magnusson himself, will be building new technology infrastructure.